From Categories To Arenas: Growth Built On Human Needs.
Competitive advantage now comes from serving durable needs.
From Categories To Arenas
For most of the 20th century, strategy was defined by categories. Companies built products, defended their shelves, and measured performance against rivals in the same line of business.
The Best Global Brands 2024 report shows why this model no longer explains market leadership. Growth now follows arenas of human needs, play, connect, move, thrive, where very different players converge on the same jobs to be done.
The decisive question has shifted from “what do we sell” to “what need do we help people meet.”
Frames Of Reference Are Shifting
Consumer benchmarks are no longer set inside categories. Uber set expectations of immediacy, Spotify normalized abundance, and Google defined simplicity. These standards ripple outward into unrelated industries.
Customers carry those reference points everywhere, forcing incumbents to meet thresholds defined outside their sector. In this environment, category competition is too narrow. Brands must operate on the broader stage of need fulfillment.
Leadership Expectations
The report makes clear that brands are no longer judged only on product quality or category share. Leadership is now tied to how companies address existential challenges, climate change, resource depletion, and social conflict. At a time when trust in institutions is low, business is expected to play a societal role.
Arena thinking extends beyond consumer utility; it positions brands as active participants in solutions, not just market players.
Global Evidence Of Arena Thinking
Apple dropped “Computer” from its name in 2007, moving from a device-maker into entertainment, payments, and health. Its 2024 brand value reached $488.9 billion, larger than the combined value of all brands ranked 50–100. The unifying principle is not category dominance but addressing multiple needs, do, connect, play, thrive.
Amazon evolved from books to “the Everything Store,” then into cloud, entertainment, and logistics. Its arena is frictionless access. That breadth underpins its $298.1 billion valuation.
Disney demonstrates how a single arena can stretch across decades. Anchored in play, it grew from animation into franchises, parks, cruises, and streaming. Ferrari, the fastest riser in 2024, expanded into luxury fashion and lifestyle while sustaining its motorsport and automotive core.
These examples illustrate how brands build competencies around enduring needs rather than defending a single product set.
The Operating Shift
The report identifies a reversal in the growth model. Legacy companies built competencies and then sought customers. Arena brands invert the sequence: they establish trust with customers first, then build or acquire competencies to meet evolving needs.
This explains why leaders today are “businessing their brand”restructuring operations around meaning systems rather than branding the business after the fact.
Financial Proof
The impact is measurable. Every single-point rise in the combined Role of Brand and Brand Strength scores correlates with a 2.3% increase in share price.
Interbrand also shows that portfolios of multi-arena brands outperform the S&P 500 and MSCI World Index. Arena strategy compounds value by giving brands permission to expand across needs and sectors.
Guardrails
The report is explicit: not every brand should expand into multiple arenas. Every brand, however, requires an arena strategy. This may be defensive, spotting threats from unexpected players addressing the same need; offensive, meeting a need in new formats; or expansive, widening the brand’s role in people’s lives.
Kodak’s collapse underlines what happens when brands fail to look beyond their category.
Bottom Line
Categories are fragile; needs endure.
Brands that structure growth around arenas win permission to scale across industries, sustain pricing power, and outperform financial markets.
